Note: I am not a climate change skeptic. But I deplore biased scientists who leave out essential information to make their case. These scientists are not advancing a better understanding of how the world works. Or making the world a better place. Because if you cheat, there will be blow-back, eventually.
In "Motivated recall in the service of the economic system: The case of anthropogenic climate change" (2016) Hennes et al (2016) make the case that when economic consumption is threatened, people are less open to initiatives to combat climate change and more likely to doubt human-caused climate change in the first place. Their argument is based on lab studies linking perceptions of economic risk to climate change skepticism, as well as survey evidence showing the number of Americans endorsing anthropogenic climate change fell during the Great Recession, between 2007 and 2009. The authors' basic theory is that when people sense economic threat, they are more likely to value order and stability, which motivates them to justify the existing economic system and downplay evidence suggesting the system itself is a problem.
Hennes et al further suggest that "linking environmental information to statements about the strength of the economic system may satiate system justification needs and break the psychological link between proenvironmental initiatives and economic risk.” In other words, the government and environmentalists should stress how great the economy is doing to get people to stop denying the consensus and embrace an environmentalist agenda to combat climate change.
It makes sense that if people are worried about the economy, they're apt to de-prioritize and minimize other concerns, especially if dealing seriously with those other concerns is perceived as economically risky. Like climate change. So when Hennes et al experimentally induced study participants to be concerned about the economy, it wasn't surprising that many subsequently downplayed the scientific evidence and seriousness of climate change. But are such psychological processes a significant factor in the American public's changing attitudes about climate change, as Hennes et al argue? That's a big leap to make.
For one thing, Americans were becoming less concerned about climate change in the years before the Great Recession, as the following chart makes clear:
Note the economy was doing well between 2002 and 2004, yet during this period there was a 7% increase in the number of survey respondents who thought the seriousness of global warming was exaggerated. Yes, during the Great Recession there was an increase of 6% of those surveyed who thought the threat of global warming was exaggerated, but this appears to be an acceleration of an existing trend, as there was also a 3-4% rise in the year before the economic downturn, during which US consumer confidence was actually high. Given that consumer confidence indices track optimism about the current state of the economy and often incorporate expectations about the future, how would one reconcile these survey results with the theory that perceived economic risk increases the likelihood of climate change denial? Beats me.
As for the suggestion to "break the psychological link between proenvironmental initiatives and economic risk”, at first glance, I thought Hennes et al were assuming the link between environmental initiatives and economic risk was only psychological and not real. However, it's also possible they accept this link as real but just don't want people to focus on it. If the latter, the authors are assuming an inevitable conflict between combating climate change and economic stability or growth. Either way, they should articulate and justify these assumptions.
Hennes et al should also have seriously addressed alternative explanations for the decline in public concern about climate change, both before and during the Great Recession. For instance, they could have addressed the common observation of the time that environmental activists were misrepresenting the scientific consensus in an attempt to scare people into accepting their agenda. For example, in the 2009 piece, What’s driving opinion on global warming?, Michael Shellenberger suggests that the 2006-2009 drop in public concern:
...coincides with a period of intensified media coverage of "An Inconvenient Truth," released in June 2006, which suggested that global warming was behind recent hurricanes, droughts, and floods. The poster for "An Inconvenient Truth" showed a hurricane coming out of a smokestack. The problem, as Revkin* points out, is that scientists cannot and do not attribute the increase in these events to global warming. The new Gallup polling indicates that, in exaggerating global warming's effects since 2006, greens have actually created their own backlash.
Thus, growing public skepticism about the message may have been fueled by declining trust in the messengers. By misrepresenting the scientific consensus and ramping up the scaremongering, environmental activists pretty much invited resistance. Per the following quote, such obvious "persuasive intent" rarely succeeds in persuading:
People tend to discount information from sources with obvious persuasive intent.... [messages] where explicit persuasive intent may be present are subject to lower credibility assessments, perhaps as a result of higher scrutiny or skepticism. Flanagin & Metzger (2007)
Ironically, the suggestion to "break the link" between economic risk and proenvironmental initiatives could actually backfire by inviting closer examination of that link. Better to have an honest discussion with the doubters than to assume they're dummies with psychological issues.
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*Andrew Revkin who wrote a New York Times article with the headline, "In Climate Debate, Exaggeration is Common Pitfall."
References:
Flanagin, A. J. and M. J. Metzger (2007). "The role of site features, user attributes, and information verification behaviors on the perceived credibility of web-based information." New Media & Society 9(2): 319-342.
Hennes, E. P., Ruisch, B. C., Feygina, I., Monteiro, C. A., & Jost, J. T. (2016). Motivated recall in the service of the economic system: The case of anthropogenic climate change. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(6), 755-771. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000148